“For now, roughly half of the university system’s ChatGPT licenses have been activated, suggesting that at the very least C.S.U. paid for tens of thousands of logins that have gone entirely unused.” This is the scandal in plain sight. Why is CSU paying for a product that is free?
Benjamin Riley
Directory member with public evidence across Models & releases, AI business.
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Articles & links
Giddy with hope that this dumb op-ed will bait @colin-fraser.net into a thread pondering whether Toucan Sam is conscious. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
“We need to talk to young people about reading to outrun and outfight injustice. Reading for liberation and emancipation & for intellectual freedom, and to have the strength to fight in the arenas of the mind, because when we let a computer think for us, we put a gun to the he…
“Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college…In our tech-enabled, newly A.I.-powered world, students were increasingly fudging just about everything.” A very God & Man at Stanford vibe here, but a…
"Our students—and others in their AI-skeptical generation—are thoughtful moral agents who have used their capacity for critical reflection to arrive at compelling and deeply felt moral objections to using generative AI in their university work. We think educators should respec…
“Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them…The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.” - @tressiemcp…
Source document here, just let your eyes glaze over the math equations: cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085...
This wide ranging conversation will cause heartburn for AI enthusiasts and skeptics alike. It's worth listening to (or reading) for that very reason. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/o...
www.wsj.com/tech/ai/esto...
Fantastic, @bcmerchant.bsky.social takes on the bullshit propaganda machine that is Anthropic, saving me the trouble (and doing it better than I ever could). They are the worst. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-anthro...
Anthropic has been “unnecessarily antagonistic to open weight models [and] open research. [The company] has a specific view of AI, but such a powerful technology will never have its final equilibrium be one of singular control by a private company.” - @natolambert.bsky.social …
Well, apart from the elaborate "constitution" they've developed for Claude, you mean. www.anthropic.com/constitution
Recent commentary
Reading an essay by @mikexcohen.bsky.social comparing the complexity of biological neurons with the input-output function of the artificial neurons used in AI and here's his pictorial summation of the two:
Just received an email from OpenAI about all the neat things one can create using Codex and it hit me — this is just the old SkyMall catalog but at scale. Stuff that’s kind of novel and semi-intriguing for like two minutes but ultimately solving problems no one really has.
OpenAI is launching a new suite of "education plug-ins" and just look at the amazing pedagogical innovations that are happening now because of AI.
Has anyone written the definitive essay already on how Anthropic's "Claude for Teachers" is nightmarish package of surveillance software & privacy intrusions, or is that really something I'm going to have to take on over the weekend?
A new report on AI in education from Australia refreshingly dispenses with the “but it holds so much promise!” verbiage and instead goes straight to cataloguing its many harms. More of this please! (Link to follow)
This is, as best I can tell, not a satirical Dada-ist experiment aimed at revealing the dystopia of an agentic AI future.
The fun thing about this sort of mistake is that it’s understandable if you have a basic mental model of how LLMs work. Not conscious beings. Just token samplers capable of generating — wait for it — hallucinatory output.
Just a remarkable paragraph this morning from Ben Thompson of Stratechery (an unabashed AI enthusiast, mind you). I’ve written previously that OpenAI reminds me of Enron. But Anthropic? The only analogue that comes to mind is Gattaca.
OpenAI is running a massive randomized control trial on 20,000 Estonian high school students. They apparently are not thrilled.
This tweet neatly encapsulates my working hypothesis on the impact of AI on mathematics. (Found via Alberto Romero’s excellent essay on this topic, linked below.)
In Benjamin Riley's orbit
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